How Zaha Hadid is building for Bach

Thirty years ago his Brandenburg concertos took him into space, on a vinyl record sent on the Voyager spacecraft as an example of Earth culture for any aliens it might meet. And this July, at Manchester’s International Festival (from July 2 to 19), he’ll occupy the architectural equivalent of a bespoke suit: an elegant music hall precisely tailored to his chamber works.

Zaha Hadid is the architect responsible for the installation within Manchester Art Gallery, which will seat 200. “We wanted to build something that enhanced the music and the venue,” she tells Wired, having just got back from a trip to Korea. “It’s an intimate space made up of layered ribbons.”

Although the structure isn’t a literal interpretation of his music, Hadid does find analogies between Bach and the design. “The layering and its lightness are very similar to the intricacies of Bach,” she says. “We don’t do frozen architecture. I believe in movement and velocity in building design, and that lends itself to reflecting the movement of musical composition.”

Hadid did worked closely with acoustician Mark Howarth, who tested the room with Bach’s chamber music to refine the sound. “It was important that the reverberation time wasn’t too long as it would blur individual notes and ruin the intricacy,” he says. “So designers used hidden reflector panels to control strength, and the cloth structure for reverberation and direction. We opted for a precise reverberation time of 1.4 to 1.7 seconds at mid frequencies, and longer reverberation at lower frequencies to sustain the bass and provide a warm room-response.”

Hadid says: “It’s been a fascinating project. Discovering the intersection between architecture and music has been the most liberating thing.”